The act of choosing a program can be done discretely by the use of a remote control, or less discretely by touching buttons placed on the hearing aid. In either case however the user is made aware of his hearing disability and in some degree also people around may notice this action. Further this action may take some time, and during this time the attention of the hearing aid user is directed to the hearing aid and not directly at the surroundings, and these moments of less attention is disturbing to both the hearing aid user and to the people who are maintaining a conversation or other kind of communication with him or her.
From U.S. Pat. No. 6,035,050 a hearing aid system is known, wherein a solution to the above problem is attempted. The hearing aid system has a matching arrangement with a first memory for several parameter sets available for selection for each of several hearing situations, an input unit for selecting a current hearing situation and for selecting one of the several parameter sets available for this hearing situation, and a second memory for allocation data that identify the parameter sets selected for each hearing situation. For the determination of an optimal parameter set for each of several hearing situations, an optimal user-specific parameter set is allocated to each hearing situation as it arises during an optimization phase. After the optimization phase, the allocation data are evaluated in order to determine an optimal parameter set for each hearing situation. This parameter set is then programmed as the parameter set which will be called to set the transmission characteristics of the hearing aid whenever the hearing situation allocated thereto occurs.
According to the teachings of U.S. Pat. No. 6,035,050 the user needs to select both a hearing situation, which he believes to be in and make a choice as to the processing parameter set, which provides the best performance in the given situation. This leaves the user with many complex choices during the optimization phase, and the risk of confusion is high. Further this prior art hearing aid system prescribes the use of both an auxiliary module and a control module.